!Viva Puerto Rico!

Since my one Dutch friend was moving this past weekend and his neighborhood is quite far from mine and he needed help, I ended up going up there on Sat. night to help him pack and then to stay on the couch so I could be up and at it on Sun. to load the truck and clean the carpets, but, since his neighborhood is where all the Puerto Ricans live, I managed to have some fun, too.

On Sat. evening, for example, I ducked into a Puerto Rican restaurant and had dinner. The menu was laminated and had a picture of a wind-surfing frog on the cover, with a tropical island in the background and the boat's sail having the colors of the Puerto Rican flag, and when the waitress came up, this self-important, relatively light-skinned late 20s girl who was squat but not fat, since I wanted a pork jibarito but they only seemed to have a pork sandwich and jibaritos with other things than pork on them, I was like, "Do you have pork jibaritos?", and I guess I must have talked indistinctly or something, since she gave me a look and was like, "I am sorry sir, but we do not serve burritos here."

They also spelled "malta" on the menu as "marta", and they had this automatic wastebasket in the bathroom where you waved your hand in front of it and the lid opened, since I guess that's too much work for Puerto Ricans.

On Sun. I went with my one Dutch friend's one friend, who is Dutch, to go get some cafe con leche and a steak sandwich real quick (pressed bread, steak, egg, mayo, and lots of some seasoning that had a lot of cumin in it - the other customers, who were either Puerto Rican or black [or dark Puerto Ricans, because some Dominicans knocked up their madres?] were quite fat, probably from eating there so much, and several of them had on stained t-shirts), and the cafe down the street had this poster that said

I STAND WITH SOTOMAYOR

and had Sotomayor's face on it, and from the font you could tell it was distributed somehow by the Obama campaign (the font is the same as the "I BELIEVE" posters or whatever that were everywhere during the campaign).

Also, my one Dutch friend's neighbors said that when they moved into the neighborhood 10 years ago, well before any other gentrfication, one day they got hate mail from the neighborhood club asking them to move, since they wanted to keep the neighborhood for Puerto Ricans.

Also also, my one Dutch friend says that on some nights there's a Puerto Rican trannie that roams the major east-west thoroughfare just north of his house.